CAUTION: The entirety of this post is speculation only, and I understand the extent to which this would be a lot of work for animators, but the point is that we need to start asking these questions of highly produced and/or highly popular YouTube personalities given the technology to "face swap" ordinary footage of people with fake or borrowed faces. Casey Neistat is only taken here as an example of how we might approach the moving threshold of the Big Sim.

If it's a sim, this character appears to be an evolution of the early "reporter" sims we were seeing in fake brandless "news reports" appearing on YouTube last decade, and in the types of Psychological Operations using personalities that are perhaps partially acted but most certainly (also) simulated characters like Judy Wood, Dylan Avery ("co-creator" of Loose Change), Peter Joseph ("creator" of Zeitgeist) and so forth. The strategy of a sim with this influence would be to supplant the dying popularity of television, take over the growing population of "homegrown" stars, and to pour lots of money into creating synthetic persons for mass culture creation. (Though I don't mean to over-compliment the effect nor downplay the real phenomenon).

If it's a sim, it's a large and frequent operation releasing lots of videos. (Which is an okay argument for it not being a sim, since it takes NASA and other definitely simulating organizations so long to crank out videos, and we see other weird characters like Snowden mostly just relegated to rooms) However, one argument against that would be that greater frequency and range of video subjects would be to put State efforts toward tests of credulity and to gain/read reactions. There could also be a combined experiment of this or any future personality: scan the body and transition the character from viral celebrity to pure data.

If it's a sim in this video, the inner mouth lighting has improved (a notorious issue with CGI characters that followed synthetic people into the land of the sim news events) but the movement is still looking (to me) a bit superficial and localized — not by "muscles" as we might imagine but by an animation technique called "rigging". I suppose the illusion of rigging may be caused by certain strange lighting decisions/recording systems?

I don't have any evidence that this character of "Casey Neistat" doesn't have a "source face" that looks like him, but I do believe this video, which finally "reveals" his eyes (normally hidden behind glasses — and he even has a video about why that purportedly is) could be simply a CGI creation with a voice/body assigned to it.

Watch these portions of his face I've highlighted in green and please wonder if the face parts move realistically or not and/or too independently of one another. Also note in high quality video (maximized full screen video) the behavior of the foreground (character) interacting with the background (room) and note that this appears to be a composite. I have shown a couple instances of the bad anti-aliasing in the cyan boxes. There are missing chunks and bits that might be casually (lazily) attributed to "compression" but in our day and age of fakery, it's important to ask if any compression will actually remove square chunks just as if the foreground were pasted on the background.

You can either mute the audio or unmute it while paying attention to the wagging tongue-like thing in his mouth (could be a tongue) and the breath- and utterance-like efforts of the parts of the neck (could be a neck).

Watch, also, the behavior of the camera, how the character's shirt interacts with its collar and neck, the typical moving/disappearing moles (as seen in various sim-interviews, as I've pointed out earlier, though perhaps this is simply the behavior of cameras?) and the behavior and stretching of the face during expressions, which appear to have artificially edited individual images within animation sequences at best (could, again, be an artifact of modern cameras? Making video look more like animation due to the handling of square pixels, interlacing or other modernizations of video), even if there were an original face that this "Casey" character belonged to and was transformed into. Motion capture is undoubtedly a favorite technique since they could take a military actor and turn them into anything. So I believe simmed YouTube personalities could be motion captured.

I would guess that the sort of person or persons directing an effort like that could have crossed over into the known video-game industry based on skills used for rendered CGI "cut scenes", but I don't doubt the military still keeps their private and separate Hollywood/game industry with its own safe buildings and locations.

The watch dial doesn't have numbers — okay, contemporary — and the tattoo on this character has a kind of vaguely Satanic (?) "DO MORE" reversed on the arm (accompanying the forward scripted "always be doing" message). A bit on the subject of the mind, even if based on a real tattoo and explained as some self-motivating mirror message.

In conclusion, both positions are feasible: this character could be real or unreal. Do we know? Should we ask?

As a side note, notice how many millions of views are credited to this popular character with each minor update. 2.5 million views in a day? That's better than TV figures for some extremely popular shows. Could be real, but even if it is, we can be sure it is digitally "promoted" to those with tendencies of predicted endorsement/interest, based on advertising sorts of data. Meanwhile, we have seen the viewing numbers attached to Simon's videos get edited — live and/or at random — and kept artificially low.

Thanks for checking me on any paranoia. Let me know if you vote "real" on this character. NASA apparently can't do better than this, so it would be fairly cutting edge stuff. Which makes sense, given the time that has elapsed since the fairly limited/boxy/broken sims of 2001. Or not.

I totally understand the paranoia, but in this case I must vote for "not a sim". Of course I might be wrong but... I browsed through some of the videos. The crowds, the street scenes, the casualty of it, the frequency of videos and the overall quality... It seems to me that this is just too much work for a virtual character. To appreciate the scale of the work just think that a virtual character here implies that all the people we see who recognize him in the street are also actors or sim-entities. And there's a lot of those. Sets, scenes, people... We would have to postulate a Hollywood-scaled crew working on this, which nonetheless is happy to go completely unmentioned. Of course possible, but... I don't fully see the purpose here. Also to consider is the fact that according to wickedpedia his fortunes on video date back to 2003. Of course this could be a fabrication, but if those 12 years old videos really are that old, I doubt they can be fake and yet as good at disguising virtual identity as the ones we see today.

On the other hand reading that he has a HBO special with his brother called "The Neistat Brothers" sort of spooked me, reminded me of the ever-awful, non-existing Naudet Brothers.

hoi.polloi wrote:As a side note, notice how many millions of views are credited to this popular character with each minor update. 2.5 million views in a day?

I'd firstly like to comment on that "side note" of yours, dear Hoi. Let's see, so this "Casey Neistat" character uploaded that video you posted above ... like what, two days ago (July 7, 2016)?? And it has today (July 9, 2016), 2.652.776 views? Wow. What's up with that? Not even Justin Bieber's latest "hit" - nor a scandalous video of Madonna caught dancing naked with the dead Michael Jackson would possibly achieve such numbers - in only two days.

Ok, so we can see that our "Casey Neistat" youtube vlogger has 3.637.306 subscribers. Now, that is almost as many folks as the (3.321.667 ) viewers who - according to Youtube - have watched his "WHY I ALWAYS WEAR SUNGLASSES" video, which was uploaded three days ago (July 6, 2016). Amazing - just amazing.

And as you point out, what's the deal with that bizarre "hiding his eyes behind sunglasses" thing? I suppose it's just a coincidence that his funny name, "Casey Neistat", anagrams as "T. Satanic Eyes". Oh well, that extra "T" spoils it, doesn't it? (quietly thinking of NASA's first director, "T. Keith Glennan")

Okay, thank you for the inspection. I am happy with just "he's promoted" and "the technology for a cartoon character this prolific isn't quite there with the monetary/societal justification" yet. I was thinking people being recorded would not quite remember his face and perhaps that could be exploited, but by no means do I want to "Goldbug" our research and claim with 100% certainty (to my fault) that some real person is modified in exactly the way that I intuit.

Although I think displaying and broadcasting an enforced casualness is key to passing a sim person/event/story into public imagination (and indeed that is what many NASA videos count on), I agree that some of the details in Casey Neistat videos would seem at first ridiculously out of proportion to the special effects time needed to recreate/modify the scenes unless Casey Neistat were a very special pet project/experiment. In that case, why not just a pseudo-bought out celebrity anyway? Seems easier than a full sim in this case, I agree.

Simon, I am glad you understand why I find the numbers very suspect. What is so fascinating about this particular supposed New Yorker? Is it one of those things where everyone has a subscription to it but nobody pays attention, just as people quickly adopt the newest tech from Geocities to AIM to Blogger to PhotoBucket to LiveJournal to Skype to MySpace to Facebook to Tumblr to Twitter to Instagram to ...? Is it some kind of subconscious cathartic character for people wanting to identify with New Yorkers? What's the draw, exactly?

I'm keeping on eye on this area of research, though, because the sparse interactions with Snowden/Joseph/Avery/etc. and the technology of Emily being advanced daily, I have no doubt there will be this kind of pop sim taking over grassroots media and very soon.

I don't find those numbers so strange to be honest. 2.5 million views in a day. Have you guys done some research on this?

If you google search "most viewed youtube videos 2016" or similar keywords, you will find numbers that are way more staggering. The 2.5 mill figure will start to look as quite normal for a youtube channel of medium/high growing popularity ("Casey Neitstat" ranks at number 55 on this 100 list from January 2016).

And this guy is not even at the peak of his popularity anymore (with a stretch, I probably could find our superficial New Yorker more interesting that this idiot (nah, probably not an idiot -- but you know what I mean) who plays video games, and yet his numbers seem to normally exceed the ~3 million views in the first 24 hours. Everyday. In other words, we might have our sacrosanct expectations on what is supposed to be normal -- but we are probably wrong).

As to the "surprising" equivalence that you Hoi find between the number of subscribers and the number of viewers, this is not really surprising at all, since most viewers are probably not subscribers, as not everyone needs or cares about the subscribing feature.

Bottom line, do not underestimate the sheer amount of time that adolescents and young adults in particular (who have a lot more free time than the rest of us) spend on their mobile phones.

It's also very refreshing, and I think we should be thankful, that people who have no State-sanctioned "celebrity" can, in some ways, take over that old co-opted power and bring it back into the hands of the average person. After all, just look at what Simon has accomplished!

As is often said about us, even if we are correct, our marketing sucks.

nonhocapito wrote:I don't find those numbers so strange to be honest. 2.5 million views in a day. Have you guys done some research on this?

If you google search "most viewed youtube videos 2016" or similar keywords, you will find numbers that are way more staggering. The 2.5 mill figure will start to look as quite normal for a youtube channel of medium/high growing popularity ("Casey Neitstat" ranks at number 55 on this 100 list from January 2016).

To play devil’s advocate, the Tubefilter site you linked to shows that most of the top 100 youtube channels are parts of larger, well-known media companies. You cited PewDiePie as an example, but Tubefilter tells us that his videos are produced by a company called Maker Studios, and it only takes a single google search to reveal that Maker Studios is a part of Disney. This is how Maker Studios describes itself, “Maker is a talent-first, technology driven media company and the #1 producer and distributor of online content reaching millennials in the U.S.” It was even rumoured years ago when PewDiePie’s channel started that he was employed by Disney, even though his viewers denied it and argued nonstop with those who dared make such a claim. Now it’s not hidden knowledge anymore.

In this world where millennials think they're unique and special and they’re watching a new wave of independent, tech-savvy creators who speak for their generation and viewpoint, the reality is that they’re locked into worshipping and following the same old traditional media companies they tritely pretend are out of touch: Sony, Universal, (Vevo), Viacom, Disney, etc. As indeed, these companies are the ones creating the millennial viewpoint: for example the drama associated with the new Ghostbusters movie, or the phony North Korean propaganda nonsense of The Interview. Just like how they easily make fake events seem real, they twist this viral marketing garbage into appearing to be a real emotional, sophisticated response from a new generation of ostensibly free-thinkers.

In short, this guy’s videos have zero content and even millennials won’t watch something with zero content.

Ataraxia, I totally agree with you. I actually think this is a very interesting line of research.

What I argued above about the 2.5 million viewers was just along the lines of "it's not such a strange number".

But you're right in saying that many of these so called youtube phenomena could be, and probably are, manipulated and controlled. These so called "algorithms" are probably very efficient in selecting friends from foes, in making arbitrarily popular someone at the expenses of someone else. Whether the count of views is altered artificially, or the chances to exposure are given to someone selectively, there is no reason to think that the final count is a real, legit number.

So yes, I correct what I suggested at the end of my post above, it's not really about the free time people have to browse on their mobile phones, and watch videos no stop, but rather about the chances they have to encounter something real, new, authentic as opposed to some Disney broth for bamboozling the mind.

The bottom line, like you suggest, is that, if corporate can help it, nobody will be given so much power to reach the masses unless they are under some form of control over what they say or suggest. Just imagine if "Pewdipie" woke up tomorrow making a video about how faked news events are. Except, for some reason, this never happens.

(It could be argued, however, that across the internet there is something like authentic, spontaneous popularity. Only, over a certain threshold, it probably happens to those who know better than touching controversial issues in ways that could alienate the powers that be).

(At 10:35 in the above video, we then learn that Casey sold in 2008 his first 8-episode TV series to HBO for 'just under $2 million...")

Hey! Casey was there ! Here's proof positive of his presence at the WTC on 9/11 ... Seriously now: the blatant phoniness of this shot (a simple overlay of a few frames of Casey's face over the digitally-crafted scenery of the smoking towers) should be obvious to everyone. Only heaven knows how Casey would have possibly panned his camera from one side to the other of his face - as seen in the above gif. An extremely cheap / lazy effort to add Casey to the alleged '9/11 amateur videographer' roster.

I trust you will instantly notice the striking resemblance of the above '9/11 imagery' with the 'good ol' Steven Rosenbaum / Camera Planet material (and other assorted / purported "amateur footage") - which we have relentlessly / methodically been exposing over the years for its entirely fraudulent, digitally-crafted / 'green-screened' nature.

Need I say more? Well, I will : here's an article by none other than Steven Rosenbaum - citing Casey Neistat as a contributor to what Rosenbaum proudly envisions as a hot new web video trend / "live TV / video streaming'" - and mentions a show to be produced 'live from the YouTube studios on Main Street in Park City, Utah' ...

"BBYO (formerly B'nai B'rith Youth Organization) the leading pluralistic teen movement aspiring to involve more Jewish teens in more meaningful Jewish experiences. For 90 years, BBYO has provided exceptional identity enrichment and leadership development experiences for hundreds of thousands of Jewish teens."https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBYO

But of course, it would be 'anti-semitic' of me to even speculate that Jews were somehow involved with the wretched 9/11 hoax...

Of course this guy had to be a 9/11 shill. I wonder if anybody who is allowed to amount to anything in NYC can escape shilling for the official 9/11 story.

Remarkable how, evidently to mask the low/fake quality of the videos in his possession, he decides to show his alleged 9/11 videos through the viewfinder of an old camera:

Also typical, in its self-involved pathological individualism, the instrumental way in which 9/11 is described, as a "turning point" for his life, which made everything better.

Yeah well, then we know which side you are on.

As to B'nai B'rith... that's the organization which Trotsky, the genocidal murderer "revolutionary", joined when in NYC. At the time apparently still a closet free-masonic lodge for the promotion of Zionism. (I suppose it is also "anti-semitic" to suggest that the "revolution" to take over Russia was also an operation which saw a great zionist involvment.)

Based on this character's very high level of "perpery", I'd say do not be surprised if they do a body scan of the fellow and turn him into a cartoon character. If they haven't already.

We certainly have reason to believe they are editing and faking and computer-enhancing celebrity/politician characters for the media. We have to put on our thinking caps if we're going to come up with the reason why. But my older guess still stands as my best one: they wish to eventually supplant the need to associate with us at all. They'd rather all plebians of their version of the Global State interact with an entirely automated system that requires minimal maintenance, like a dishwasher that runs societies. For the time being, that system involves our interest in "Presidents" and celebrities. And perhaps they are safe in assuming it's unlikely to change dramatically from those things very soon.

Big surprise! This "Casey Neistat" character has become an official employee of the fake news media, now that CNN has purchased his unpopular (and completely pointless) video-sharing app "Beme" for $25 million.

According to Variety, a new venture will come out of the acquisition. Beme is shutting down, and its 11 employees, including Neistat, will join CNN to start a new media brand focused on millennial viewers. [...]This new venture will be different from a traditional news outlet. “The new company will be devoted to filling the world with excellent, timely, and topical video and empowering content creators to use technology to find their voice,” CNN told Variety. “It won’t be what most people think of as ‘news,’ but it will be relevant to the daily conversations that dominate our lives.”

Much like with Beme, Neistat seems to want to bring a new, authentic spin to news that many young people think is lacking in traditional media. "A huge part of my particular audience sees news and media as largely broken,” Neistat said in an interview with The New York Times. "My dad sees it as the word of God, but I think the young people definitely do not."